charles barrow's writing

Here is the first drabble I wrote. I think I might have mentioned, in an earlier post, that I wrote it to send to a website that was calling for competition entries. They set the gene as SciFi, and the theme as Inventions . I spent a lot of time on this, a new writing form for me, honing and editing until I was happy. I had a lot of fun with it, and when it was finished I emailed it off, meeting the given deadline, and was very pleased with myself for having had the discipline to complete the given task. Listen, I know some people can knock out a great drabble in five minutes flat, but that's not how I work. I write, I edit, I leave well alone for a few days, I return to write, I re-edit, then ignore for a week, then return etc etc. I'd still be working on it now if the deadline hadn't forced me to send it out. Anyway, there was no happy ending to this story. I logged on, on the day following the competition deadline, only to find that the website hadn't changed, the la...

I struggle with similes, and metaphors. I mean I struggle to invent them. Whenever I'm writing a sentence, and I'm on a collision course with one or the other, when I know I'm going to need to invent one in the next 5 seconds, then I start to sweat. When I reach the point of no return, I usually drop a couple of question marks as place holders, in lieu of the magic metaphor, and then move on with the rest of the sentence, fully intending to return once I've given the problem some thought. So, no, they don't come naturally. It might take me hours, sometimes days, to think of one that I'm happy with. Often I never come up with anything, and then I'll go back and restructure a sentence so as to avoid the need. Occasionally, though, one will just pop into my head, like the simile in the header here, that I really like, and that I think is a cut above my usual standard. Unfortunately, this one occurred when I wasn't writing anything. So this is an orphan simi...

  Are we still in lockdown? I know that people in some parts of the country are back in lockdown, but here in the south, where I live, we aren't (technically) though many of our freedoms are still curtailed, or re-curtailed (if that's even a word), so it certainly feels as though I'm still living in the shadow of it. Maybe I'll have to find a new word to use in my headings that better sums the up the new reality of where we are. Anyway, the thrust of this post is intended to be about the learning that I've done over the past few months as a way of reminding myself that I haven't just been resting on my laurels, or wallowing in self pity on a full-time basis. I've not been standing still, there has been forward motion, albeit at a stately pace. I've completed two on-line writing courses over the summer. The first was about memoir writing, and I did it through the DailyOm website. I have no intention of writing my memoirs, but it looked like a really inter...

Time for some good news.  I've had a (very) short story accepted for publication by 101words.org I've mentioned before that I've been focussing on writing drabbles recently. These are 100 word stories, that I find challenging but fun to write. I visit them everyday, and tinker around (add a word here, cut a word there), and I find this a really good way for me to keep writing when I'm not really in the right place to focus on my main work in progress. Earlier this year I had a drabble finished and polished, and I sent it out to a website that was running a competition, I was so pleased with myself for actually sending it out, and literally the day after I sent it the site crashed. It completely disappeared from the internet, and has never returned. Sigh. I took that as a sign that maybe the story wasn't great, I mean, it literally blew up a website. So I filed that story and started another, and found another site that accepted submissions. This one is the above men...

Thirty years ago, or so, I wrote a romcom. It was a gay romcom, set in a karaoke bar, called Dolly Would. It was a musical gay romcom, all the characters sang country songs, when they fell in love, or when their man done them wrong, and broke their heart (which happened a lot). I wrote is as a film script originally, it morphed out of another script about rent boys and working girls in Brighton. That script, Fairy Tale, had a producer attached for a while, but the deal fell through, and I lost my way with it, put it a drawer for a few years and forgot about it... until I fetched it out and re-worked it into that county+western themed love story. Eventually, as in years later, it got re-written again, this time as a novel. It changed a lot in the transition, but I always felt that it lost more than it gained, so I put it back into that drawer, where it remains; the drawer where many of my favourite stories go to die. I mention it here because I made a momentous decision about it this we...

I've lost my way a little recently, with my writing I mean. I finished my last writing project, John Mann - At Day's End, and published it over 18 months ago, and I've struggled to find a project to focus on since then. I've had plenty of story ideas, and that's probably the problem, I've had too many ideas. It seems like a good problem to have in many ways, too many ideas, but a problem is a problem no matter how it presents itself. I've followed each of those ideas for a distance, a period of time, be it a matter of hours, days or weeks. I've outlined the whole story of one, written a couple of chapters of another, noted detailed dialogue from a scene for a different one altogether. I'm a bit like a dog whose attention keeps getting sidetracked from the stick, to a scent, to a butterfly, to the ball. I focus intently, for a time, and then something else catches my attention and I move on. Is this a personality disorder, a form of writer's block...

Lockdown continues to ease, but not all my anxieties ease along with it. Few aspects of life seem like normal life yet. I wear a mask on the bus, and on the train. I wear a mask in the supermarket. Outside the Apple store an employee wants to take my temperature before I'm allowed to enter. I ask her what will happen if I test positive for a high temperature; will I just be turned away? Will she offer me follow up advice? Counselling? She seems confused by my questions, and doesn't attempt to answer them. I feel bad that I asked her, though I think my questions are legitimate. I feel bad for her that she's out here alone on the frontline, facing people like me who ask awkward questions. I'm not happy but I allow her to take my temperature, and I pass the test, so she asks me to join a queue to get through the front door of the store. I'm vaguely relieved to learn that I'm not being turned away, and that I have no discernible sign of illness, but I don't want...